


Ren and Rey and Red

by Mertiya



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Childhood Friends, Darker Rey, Deconstruction of the Jedi philosophy, First Time, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Hux, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lighter Hux, Lighter Kylo, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Self-Worth Issues, Soulmates, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-02-26 07:09:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13230573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: They are three children with an unlikely bond: Rey, lost in a desert and desperately lonely; Red, who hates his father but is still walking the path he laid out for him; and Ren, who is supposed to be a Jedi but doesn't know how.  Or: what if Rey, Hux, and Kylo were force-connected as children?





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I've bumped Rey's age up by five years to make the premise work a little better, on the grounds that her own estimate of her age may not be very accurate anyway, given: stranded on a desert planet for years and years by herself. So instead of being born in 15 ABY, she is born in 10 ABY, five years after Kylo. Thanks to Kyros who is probably the major reason I have a good grasp on Hux's characterization.

            “Leia!” Luke embraced his sister warmly. “How are you?”

            She smiled at him, and he felt her emotions ripple through the Force around her. “Stars, I am exhausted.” She pushed an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “But happy. Luke, I—”

            He could already feel the energy swirling around her belly. “I know,” he grinned. “I’m going to be an uncle.”

            She pushed at his upper shoulder. “You couldn’t even _pretend_ to be surprised?” she asked archly.

            “I _am_ surprised. How did Han react when you told him you were having triplets?”

            Leia’s face went blank. “Triplets?” she echoed in confusion.

            “Two boys and a girl, right?” Luke reached out again, questioningly. As he’d thought, there were three little energy nexuses, swirling with energy. The central one, banded with bright life energy and a nascent sense of _eagerness_ , responded to his gentle touch by reaching back curiously, but as he turned his attention to the other two, there was a strange twang, almost like panic, and they rippled and faded, like stilling waves. Luke frowned. “I was sure…” he trailed off. There was only one now, just the central child, new and grasping for life with every sense it possessed. “I guess I was wrong.”

            It might have been an unusual disturbance in the Force, or simply something he didn’t know about. Once again, Luke shook his head in frustration. There was just so much they didn’t _know_. Even if he could find the old Jedi texts—and he promised himself he was going to try—would it be enough? _Trust in the Force_ , he told himself, let go of the feeling of doubt, and turned back to his sister. “Well, I’m excited for however many nieces and nephews I'm going to have,” he smiled.

            Leia’s answering smile was bright enough to illuminate the room. “We’re going to name him Ben,” she said, and Luke had to turn to the side to hide his tears. “Our little victory miracle.”


	2. Shared Pain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren and Rey comfort Red.

Water was dripping again. Ren shifted uncomfortably; his bottom was cold and sore from sitting on the floor of the damp cave. He tried to understand the feeling without judging it, like Luke said, but his bottom was cold. He didn’t like it.

            Ren was not good at meditating. He didn’t have the focus for it. Luke told him again and again that all it took was patience and practice, but Ren couldn’t understand why, when other parts of using the Force came so easily to him, this calm thoughtlessness almost entirely escaped him. He wanted to _think_ or _do_ , not sit here while he got stiff and cold and miserable and then be told that it was good for him.

            At least the other acolytes were allowed to meditate in a group, but Ren was always singled out. Luke told him it was because he was more powerful, but Ren had trouble combating the sinking, unpleasant feeling that it was because his teacher just didn’t like him. And today Luke had had another long talk with the acolytes. Apparently, Rubuta and Bol had been caught kissing in the dormitory. Ren thought that he would like to bang both of their heads into the ground, because if they _had_ to be kissing, couldn’t they have done it somewhere sensible? Somewhere that wouldn’t have resulted in a lecture about love and how it was only appropriate for Jedi to love everyone as their brothers and sisters. Ren didn’t _want_ to love everyone. He didn’t like most of the other acolytes, and, in fact, he suspected his feelings bordered on the forbidden feeling of _hatred_ for a few of them. Which probably meant there was something wrong with him. Not that he hadn’t already known that, he supposed.

            Pain spiked through his awareness, and his thoughts jerked away from his own troubles. _Red?_ he thought tentatively, and what came back was a wordless howl of frustration and misery.

            _Rey!_ Ren called, because he could feel already this was going to need both of them. She was slow to respond; maybe she was sleeping, napping in the intense heat of the desert afternoon. It still awed Ren to feel that heat; it was like nothing he’d ever experienced before, but Rey just shrugged. It was just what it was like where she lived, she’d said. No sense fussing about it, and it made it easier for her to sleep than the bonechilling cold of the nights.

            Red was still there, a wordless presence full of anger and anguish, coming through clearer by the moment. Ren took a deep breath. Luke didn’t like it when he went too far away in his head, and Ren didn’t like to chance Luke finding out where he was _really_ going, but if Red couldn’t even form words through the connection, it was probably necessary. _Just a minute_ , he thought, and then he reached out and let the rest of the cold temple melt away.

            He was cross-legged on Red’s tiny, cramped bed, and he looked around cautiously to make sure Red was alone before he made a move to engage with him. Red was seated at the other end of his bed, knees drawn up to his chest, looking absurdly small. Ren could feel pain radiating from his form, from his back, from his head, from the clenching of his teeth.

            “He beat you again,” Ren said, and Red nodded jerkily into his arms. “Why don’t you tell Sloane?” Ren pushed. He got a mental and physical shrug, accompanied by the twinge that went through Red’s shoulders at the motion.

            “I won’t let him win,” Red said, finally, his clipped accent made even tighter by pain.

            There was a sudden wash of heat and light as Rey appeared as well, rubbing sand from her eyes. “Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “What happ—oh, _Red_.”

            “I am _fine_ ,” Red said fiercely. He hiccupped a sudden, soft sob. “I don’t need your pity.”

            “It hurts us, too, you know,” Rey snapped back, and Red dropped his head back into his knees.

            “If I could help that—”

            “Don’t you dare say you would,” Ren cut in. “I’d rather feel your pain than lose the connection. If it weren’t for you, I’d have nobody in the world.”

            Rey and Ren closed ranks around him. They couldn’t mimic physical comfort properly through the link—at least not reliably—but they could at least make Red feel like he wasn’t alone. He accepted their proximity, crying quietly into his knees, accepted Rey’s careful mental brush. Ren rarely tried, too afraid of his own power, but Rey had no trouble moving her presence through both of their heads, leaving their thoughts a little more orderly in her wake, like a kind of mental grooming.

            “Go to sleep,” Rey suggested. “Bruises feel better in the morning,” she added practically. “You don’t have any open wounds, right?”

            Red nodded doubtfully. “Doesn’t feel like it’s bleeding,” he said. “It doesn’t usually.”

            “It’ll heal.” If somebody else had said that—if _Ren_ had tried to say that—it would have come out dismissive, but Rey was good at making things sound comforting. Her boundless optimism was contagious, instead of being annoying the way Luke’s was. Maybe it was because Ren could tell that that was really how Rey _was_ , whereas sometimes Luke’s attitude seemed like a veneer hastily painted over a cracked well of doubts. Maybe that was Ren’s self reflected back at him, though. Ren hunched his own shoulders, shook off the momentary self-pity.

            “You’re going to be okay,” he said clumsily to Red. “We’re here.”

            “I wish I could leave,” Red said in a low voice. “I know there are things that I need to learn, but I want—I want to be with the two of you.”

            “Me, too,” Ren replied.

            “We’ll get there.” Rey leaned forward. “Once we’re older, it’ll be easier. Once Ren’s trained and you are, too. I’m training myself. It’s just a little bit slow.”

            Red took a long, shaky breath, then nodded. “The Force will bring us together,” he whispered, a mantra often-repeated.

            “Yes,” Rey said, fiercely, and Ren nodded, although he had his personal doubts about how much the Force cared. But the idea of an _end_ to the interminable lessons, even far away, especially one that brought with it Red and Rey with him in physical space, was enough to make him willing to beg the Force for any mercy it was willing to allow.

            There was a voice at the edge of his hearing, twisting like smoke in the wind. “I have to go,” he blurted. “My master’s back, I think. Keep safe.”

            “May the Force be with you,” Rey’s voice murmured, drifting away itself as Ren pulled himself back. There was a sickening wrenching feeling in his stomach, and then the damp of the temple closed about him again.

            “Ben?”

            Resisting the urge to answer in irritation, Ren opened his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, plastering a smile across his face.

            Luke smiled back, and Ren felt pride flash through him, followed by fear. Always fear. No matter what he did, there was always that lurking unease. Ren drooped a little, even as he heard Luke’s words of encouragement. “You’re learning to meditate, to cut out distractions, that’s good,” Luke told him. “You just need to learn to be able to hold your awareness around you while you do.”

            He wasn’t learning. Ren thought he’d probably have gone mad if it hadn’t been for Red and Rey. For years, ever since Ren could remember, the other two had been present with him. It was how he’d gotten his nickname.

            “Call me Red,” Red had said, some long time ago when they were introducing themselves, because that was what you did, even though they’d known each other as wordless presences for a long time before that. “I hate my name.”

            “I’m Rey.”

            “I’m Ben.”

            “You can’t be Ben,” Red objected. “That breaks the pattern.”

            “What, do you want to call me _Ren_?” Ren had asked scornfully, and it had stuck. He didn’t like being Ben anyway, not really. Ben was a lonely little boy who was told he was talented and whom no one ever really liked, because they were all afraid of him for some reason that they wouldn’t tell him. But _Ren_ had the two best friends in the whole galaxy, waiting for him. Red and Rey weren’t afraid of him; they wanted him there, to play with them, to talk about the Force and the way the galaxy was, and how it could be _fixed_ —Red thought about fixing the galaxy a lot, Rey just wanted to get off her dusty world of sand to see it, and Ren—Ren learned a lot from them.

            He’d always been told that he was the victory miracle, and although it had been nice at first, when he was very young, it had soured when his parents sent him away. What did it matter that he’d been pampered and celebrated for the first few years of his life, weighed against the rest of it? And in some ways even that had hurt. He’d wanted to give Red and Rey some of his food, his sweets, but he couldn’t, could only send them echoes of the taste in his mouth. They couldn’t even see each other yet; their three-way conferences had come later.

            But even when he’d been sent to stay with Luke and a certain level of ascetism had become the norm, there was always _enough_ food. Rey didn’t have enough food; she was always fighting for scraps of it. Red sometimes had enough and sometimes didn’t, and none of them knew if it was because there was a supply-line problem—Red’s argument—or if Red’s father just starved him when he felt like it—Rey’s rather cynical suggestion.

            Ren wasn’t a victory miracle; neither was Ben. He just lived in a protected pocket in the galaxy, and no one even wanted him to be there. Not _him_. Just—the prosperity that he represented. He knew he shouldn’t think like this. Rey would tell him that he could make a difference, that he made a difference to her. _You do,_ she whispered in the back of his mind, still awake, though Red’s mind had thankfully dimmed from the jagged edges of pain into the blur of sleep.

            It would be all right, Ren thought. As long as he had his friends, they’d figure things out.


	3. Elongating Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ren discover the truth about Red.

            “What are you _wearing_?” Rey and Ren were standing in the little bathroom with Red. He hadn’t called them, but they’d both come running at the crashing waves of pain that had gone through them. Ren had had to gabble out the excuse of feeling nauseous at dinner, hoping that no one would be worried enough to push too hard.

            Red stared at them blankly. “There was—” he began, but his mind was racing, too full of pain to close it from the other two, the way he—the way he always did about this.            

            “You’ve been hiding from us?” It felt like it was Ren’s collarbone that had broken, not Red’s, even though the waves of pulsing pain kept traveling up Red’s arm. He’d have to get it set. A member of the First Order, a scion of the Empire, could not afford to leave an injury untreated. The modified Imperial uniform was splattered with blood from his nose, another courtesy of the speeder accident.

            “How could you _lie_ to us like this?” Rey’s pain was different; it was a sticky heat rising into their throats to clutch and close them. “You’re…you’re one of the _Empire_?”

            “I knew you wouldn’t take it well.” The pain was fading. Ren could feel Red pulling back, tamping down on the connection between them. He wouldn’t cut it off entirely—it wasn’t even clear if any of them _could_ do that—but he would pull back enough that they couldn’t feel his every thought anymore. “And the First Order is _not_ the Empire. The Empire lost. We won’t.”

            Rey laughed, a short, sharp noise with no mirth in it. “You even _sound_ like an Imperial villain. You sound like—like Darth Vader.”

            The name sent a weird frisson down Ren’s spine, the way it always did. He knew there had to be some reason for that reaction, but he was too afraid to look and find out what the reason was.

            It was Red’s turn to laugh. “How would you know, Rey?” he sneered, and his face seemed twisted into an ugly expression that Ren had never seen before.

            Rey’s hands were balled into fists. “I _know_ ,” she said back, her thin voice tight and resonant.

            “Because you play-act at being a Jedi while you search for food on a dying world? If you don’t starve to death before we grow up, it won’t be because of the Jedi.”

            “If it weren’t for the Jedi, I wouldn’t be alive at all. The whole galaxy would probably have been snuffed out in darkness by now.”

            “The Jedi let the galaxy decay,” Red snapped, his voice gone flat and monotonous.

            “The Jedi are _heroes_!” Rey responded. Both of her hands were on her hips now, Ren noticed, and her cheeks were flushed bright red. Red, on the contrary, was almost pasty white, his eyes the only spark of color in his face, glittering dangerously. “How can you _possibly_ —” Rey’s voice rose. “Your father _beats_ you!”

            “To make me stronger.” Red’s voice was so quiet that Ren couldn’t tell what emotional state he was in any more. “It’s made me less emotional.”

            That was definitely a dig at Rey, whose mouth firmed up into a sudden, thin line. “Oh, just like Ren’s master tries to make _him_ emotionless, huh?”

            “ _Stop it_!” It sounded like Ren’s voice, but he didn’t know where it had come from. Rey was right; he knew she was right. For years and years, he’d been told of the depradations of the evil empire, how they’d killed the Jedi and nearly snuffed out the Light of the universe. But for years and years—“why can’t you both _shut up_?” he snarled. “How would either of you know anything about the galaxy? You’ve grown up on a dustball in the middle of nowhere—” indicating Rey, “—and _you’ve_ grown up in an extremist cult! At least my parents aren’t fucking _insane_!”

            “Your parents left you just as surely as Rey’s left her,” Red said, voice still laden with that soft, deathly menace.

            Darkness squeezed in at the edges of Ren’s vision, a pulsing headache blossoming behind his eyes. He lashed out—physically or mentally, he wasn’t sure—heard a startled yelp from Rey, and a soft little indrawn noise from Red, and then the vision collapsed. He was back in the small, cold temple, alone.

            “Argh!” The yell was accompanied by a sudden surge in energy around him. Ren flung out a hand, and there was a sudden, booming crack. The wall of the temple had split up the side as if a giant had swung a hammer against it. Ren stared, aghast, then looked down at this hand. He had done that. Trembling, he looked down at his hand, and then he reached for Red and Rey.

            They weren’t there. There was no one there, nothing but the darkness seeping in from the edges of the temple. Ren sucked in a horrified breath. There was something wrong with him. What had he _done?_

~

            Hux—Red—woke with a start in the middle of the night. He could just see faint moonlight trickling in somewhere over near one of the dormitory windows; in the back of his mind, someone was crying, faintly. He turned on his side, pushing his hands over his ears, trying to ignore it, but after a few minutes, he shut his eyes and let her draw him closer.

            Rey was on her side as well, her knees curled up to her chest, shivering. “Go away,” she said, faintly.

            “I knew you’d hate me if you found out,” Red said. It was a little cruel, but he disliked feeling abandoned, and his collarbone and arm were still aching fiercely.

            “Shut up, Red,” Rey told him fiercely. “I don’t hate you. I just think you’re stupid.”

            “Well, I think you’re delusional,” Red muttered back, “but I don’t hold that against you.”

            They lay like that, almost touching, just close enough to have the illusion of proximity without it becoming obvious that Red was alone in his little bed, for a long moment before Rey spoke again. “Where’s _Ren_?” she asked. “I can’t find him. I know he’s still there, but—”

            Ren’s presence had faded so much that all Red could find was a single, wild heartbeat. No thoughts, nothing but a strange, swirling fog of darkness massing that rhythmic thump. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I can’t reach him either.” And that was his fault, too. If he’d only kept the pain under control, Ren and Rey wouldn’t have needed to find out a truth that had hurt them.

            “You’re being stupid again,” Rey mumbled. “Now you sound like Ren.”

            “I do not,” Red retorted. Ren listened to people telling him he was a monster; Red knew he wasn’t a monster. Just a boy with not enough experience yet to fix everything. But he would have it someday. “Don’t worry,” he told Rey, with a bravado they both knew he didn’t feel. “We’ll get him back.”

            But when he reached again, there was still nothing but that churning darkness.

~ 

            The others were watching Ren, he was certain of it. He’d lost his temper twice yesterday, and sent the water of the temple swirling around into a cyclone before he’d been able to catch himself. Luke had calmed him down and asked him to meditate, but meditation was starting to frighten him. He had managed to brush at Rey and Red, heard Red ask him if he was all right, but the anger and hurt he felt at both of them surged up and cut them away, and then there was that cold darkness.

            _Trust me,_ a new voice whispered. _This darkness will not harm you_.

            But it would. Ren knew it would. It was the proof that he was a monster, and he had to not be. He simply still couldn’t understand how it had come to this. He had done everything the others had done—everything except that he had his two companions inside his head. Was Luke right? Was it because he hadn’t tried hard enough to control himself?

            _No,_ said the new voice. _No, the Jedi ask too much of you, Ren._

A frisson ran down his spine at the name that only Red and Rey used. _Who are you?_

_I’m a friend_.

            But then why couldn’t he feel Red and Rey?

            _They aren’t your true friends. They hurt you. Red lied to you, and Rey doesn’t understand who you really are._

            No! That wasn’t true!

            _I’m sorry,_ the voice said, a moment later. _I’m only trying to protect you._

            _Well, don’t,_ Ren thought angrily, pulling his knees into his chest.

            _As you wish._ The voice faded, and he was left with only his own thoughts for company. Red _had_ lied. Red was an Imp—an _Imp_. Ren shut his eyes. He didn’t need them. A Jedi didn’t need anyone. Luke’s teachings were the only thing he could rely on now. He certainly didn’t trust this new voice.

            Ren—no. Ben Solo stood up, wrapping his arms about himself. He would ask Luke for different meditation regimens. He would ask him how to keep his mind closed, his head shuttered, so that no one could get in. The thought hurt, and the pain carried him closer to Rey and Red. He felt Rey’s heartbeat in her sleep, and the warmth of the desert sun on her skin. Red lay beside her, staring at the back of her neck, and Ben pulled back just as they locked eyes. _Wait,_ he heard faintly, and then he felt a ribbon of rising cold, and in his panic he slammed down all the doors of his mind.

            Everything faded. He was Ben Solo, child of the Rebellion. He would be a Jedi. He would conquer this strange darkness inside of him alone, and he would no longer see fear in the eyes of others as they looked at him.

~

            “He’s hurting, but he won’t respond to me.”

            “He’s just sulking.”

            “Can _you_ feel him?”

            A pause. The response muted, “No. Not at all.”

            “We have to help him.”

            A laugh. “Face it, Rey. He hates me now.”

            “It’s not that! There’s someone else there, in his head. They’re helping him keep us out.”

            “It’s probably his master. You know what he’s like.”

            “It doesn’t feel like a Jedi.”

            “How would you know what a Jedi feels like?” Pause. “I’m sorry, Rey. If you don’t think it’s a Jedi—but what could it _be_ , then?”

            Ben surfaced from the dream, clawing his way out of his bedroll into a cold sweat. He stumbled to his feet, feeling for the wooden wall of the hut beside him. He needed someone. He needed help. He needed to meditate. Every muscle was trembling.

            He forced himself to sit with his legs crossed on his bed, forced himself to shut his eyes. Breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. Reached for his center. At least over the past few months he had begun to be able to find it. It was strange that the cold darkness he’d feared so much should be able to center him the way he’d struggled to understand since he was a child. But perhaps it was because he’d let himself fall too far towards heat and light, when true safety was the opposite.

            His mind slowly began to empty. There was only his heartbeat in his ears, only the darkness at his core. Safety. A respite. The same old screaming anger beat at him, but he could force it down now. He would not be a monster. He would be nothing. He would be _nothing_.

            Although he ought to be able to control his heartbeat by now, he could hear it speeding up in his ears. _Don’t try to control,_ Luke’s voice echoed in his head. _Just observe. Let it be_. But it was _wrong_. The heartbeat threatened to split apart into three, and Ben ground his teeth. _Stop_. He reached for the cold, and the cold came at his call, drenching himself in it, drowning in the numbness. The extra beats faded, and his heart slowed.

            No matter what Luke said, control was the only safety he had left.


	4. Monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren discovers the truth about himself.

            For once, the dream wasn’t of Red and Rey. Even after several years, they still lurked at the edge of his mind like ghosts unready to move on, but they no longer disturbed the tentative balance that Ben had finally been able to create in his mind. Sometimes they murmured to one another, voices muted and sad; occasionally one of them said something to him. Mostly, all he got were flashes of pain or fear.

            This dream was not as full-bodied as most he had of them. It was far-off and distant, reminding him of a holo transmission coming from a long distance off, although the visuals were a little clearer.

            Luke sat stooped across an iron-grey desk, talking to someone far away. At first, Ben thought it was a normal transmission, but there was no equipment, and Luke’s eyes were focused somewhere far away. His mouth did not move as he spoke.

            _I keep feeling as if he’s slipping away._ _When he was younger, I worried about his control, but he almost feels darker now that he’s started to grow into it. I don’t understand it._

_I wish I could talk to him more._ Ben started. That was his mother’s voice. _There’s just so little time and so many things to do._

_I promise you, I’m doing my best to parent him and teach him everything he’ll need. Leia—I’m worried that we should tell him. I know what it’s like not to know about your lineage and have it—sprung on you._ There was a feeling like rueful laughter tickling at Ben’s skull.

            _It doesn’t matter,_ his mother responded after a long moment. _Whoever our father was—Ben’s my little boy. He’s Ben._

_Don’t you think we should trust_ him _to know that?_

            _Should we? You’ve felt the darkness in him as well. Will this be what pushes him down the wrong path?_

            The darkness in him. Ben felt sick. He’d tried so hard, these last years. He’d thought people respected him, that they no longer thought of him as a monster. Had he denied himself Red and Rey for nothing?

            _Vader’s blood means nothing. You and I are proof of that._

Vader’s blood? Ben felt something lurch in the vicinity of his stomach, and the scene dissolved, but he was not released into wakefulness. Instead, he saw sterile white corridors and a forbidding figure in black striding down them. The hollow noise of a respirator echoed up and down the emptiness, which was emphasized by the lights blinking in the chest of the man’s armor.

            _There is another. A sister_. The figure in the corridor turned a sharp right, and mist curled up around his footsteps. He was walking through a swamp, feet sinking into the sucking mud. Something chittered in the treetops above him, and he looked up in confusion. A little dark shadow, leaping from tree to tree, favored him with a sudden glimpse of burning red eyes. He took another step, and another.

            In front of him was a smiling woman, face painted white as bone with two dots of red like fever-flush on each cheek and a red line splitting her bottom lip in two. She held a baby in each arm. The arm that had been at his side was in front of his face, and the smile dropped from hers. Her eyes bulged, and blood spilled from her mouth over the painted line. He could feel her life force fleeing. The babies fell into the curling mist, and it surged up around them. On the left, a flame sprang up; on the right, a flower. Both grew taller and taller until each one opened.

            No longer babies, the children stood, growing rapidly into a young man with blond hair and a young woman in a hooded white dress, finally recognizable. But Ben still didn’t understand, at least not until he looked down and watched the muddy water clarify. Vader’s helmet split, and it was Ben’s own face looking out, his own gawky, clumsy face with the too-big ears and the outsize nose.

            Vader’s grandson. The monster.

~

            The two moons shone like two bright coins in the sky above. Rey sat, kicking her feet, staring up morosely. It was a long, cold night, and her breath left pale curls in the air in front of her, but the cold helped her focus. The external temperature helped remind her to carry the heat she needed inside her chest to try and break through the icy wall between her and Ren.

            “Trying again?” She’d been focusing too hard to notice Red’s approach. Red, who was all sharp edges and corners these days, who unapologetically wore his modified Imperial uniform all the time now. Rey found it irksome, but no matter how many arguments they had, they only came away both unsatisfied and even lonelier than before.

            “I’m not going to give up on him.”

            “No.” Red pinched his lips together. “I won’t give up, either.” It was an unusual sentiment from him, and he shivered as he said it, rubbing his hands up his arms and then blowing on them.

            “You can feel my night so strongly?” Rey asked curiously.

            “Well, you’re shunting the cold somewhere.” Red shrugged, giving her a wary smile. “Or did you think you were just getting good at ignoring it?”

            Rey felt more heat rising to her face. So Red had been helping after all, the last few times she’d tried, just not saying anything about it. How like him. “Thanks,” she said quietly. It used to feel natural to thank Red _. And_ Ren. But as she had grown, everything had become more complicated. The world around her had not changed; Jakku was still the same lonely desert planet it had always been. But she had watched Red’s world grow narrower; she had watched the wide sea around Ren grow choppier until the connection between them was dashed to pieces on the rocks of it.

            “Things always change,” Red said, and she was perversely glad they were still connected enough he’d been able to respond to her thought, even though she could tell he was about to say something insufferable. “If you don’t want anything to change, you have to have the necessary control to hold them still. And you don’t.”

            “Neither do you,” she shot back.

            Red gave her faint, rather supercilious smile. “Not yet.”

            “Ugh, you would make a terrible galactic ruler,” Rey told him. “Someone would assassinate you within twenty-four hours, that’s how fast you’d piss everyone off.”

            “I can be personable,” Red told her. “I just don’t choose to. Efficiency is much more attractive in a man in my position.”

            Rey rolled her eyes. “Are you even eighteen yet?” she asked crossly.

            “Are you?”

            “Probably!” Although when your only method of keeping time was a bunch of scratches on the wall, and you couldn’t really remember making the earliest ones, hazarding a guess at your own age was a little difficult.

            “And you’re underfed and therefore underdeveloped,” Red told her. “You’ve been spending too much time trying to reach Ren and not enough time taking care of yourself. Again.”

            The most annoying thing Red did was being right. “Shut up,” Rey told him. “I’m going to reach him.”

            “Then what are you waiting for?” A shiver ran down his spine. “I’m freezing my balls off.”

            Rey looked back at the two bright white moons. If she squinted, they looked like blurry lights, and for some reason that point of focus made it easier to detach her mind and float forward toward where she knew Ren had to be. Toward the cold, icy barrier he had erected after the vicious argument they’d all three had.

            They knew he was stubborn—all three of them were stubborn. But this was something beyond stubbornness. _Something_ had happened that day, to Ren. Something that bordered on catastrophic. And they still didn’t know what it was.

            _Ren_. She reached out for him. _Come on, you idiot. It’s Rey. Let me in_.

            She wasn’t expecting the lash of emotion that hit her like a physical blow, and she actually staggered back, tripped, and fell. Red’s concern flared inside her mind, but it was faint and mild compared to the magnitude of the burning pain and fear she’d encountered. _Monster,_ Ren’s mind screamed at her. Rey was screaming as well, her hands clapped over her ears as if she was trying to block off a physical noise, but it didn’t do any good.

            _Monster_. A dark figure was looming out of the shadows in front of her, and, as she stared, there was a humming noise she’d only ever heard through Ren’s ears, and a crimson blade sprang into existence, illuminating the dark, faceless helmet of one of the galaxy’s collective nightmares.

            Rey reached for her side, rolling up onto her knees and then dodging to the side. Instinctively, she felt outwards for the Force around her, and it surged brightly to hand, much more easily than it ever had before. There was a weight in her hand as she thought it, and a bright blade springing into existence from it. The dark figure swung the red blade at her face, and she caught it on her own green sword with a loud, snapping rise in the hum. Both of them jumped back and began to circle one another. There was another noise rising in the back of her mind, an irritating buzz too uneven to be another light saber.

            Just one good strike—Rey stabbed forward at the same time her opponent did, but both of them stopped as a blur of motion settled between them. “—you two _lunatics_ think you’re doing?” Red finished from between them.

            Rey’s hand shot to her mouth, dropping the light saber, and to her surprise and relief, the blade winked out of existence, leaving behind only a single burned splotch on the back of Red’s impeccably white uniform, rather than the gaping wound she’d half-expected. Beyond Red, the black mask split down the front with a sickening snap, and it was Ren’s face looking back at her. “Oh, stars,” he whispered; the red blade vanished as well, and Red gasped in a pained breath.

            “Ren!” Rey jumped forward, but he was already backing away.

            _Stars, I’m so sorry—I hurt you—my legacy—better off without me—_

And with that, he was gone, his lean dark figure melting into the stars now beginning to appear, twinkling, at the horizon. She felt one last apologetic brush of his mind, and then the icy cold set in again.

            “Well,” Red said from behind her, “that could have gone better.”


	5. Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren flees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> luke wut r u doin. luke stahp.
> 
> here's the last jedi spoilers btw.

            Hux winced, mechanically stripping off his gloves and then the rest of his uniform. He checked his chest and back, but there was, as he’d expected, no actual injury, although he could still feel the cauterizing heat of the two blades. One had gone through a lung, the other through the base of his spine and out his stomach. That had _not_ been pleasant. Especially not as the first time they’d managed to break through to Ren in the Force knew how long.

            Rey was pretending not to cry in the back of his head, and Hux pretended that he couldn’t hear her. Instead, he drew a little more of the desert cold into himself as he mechanically prepared for his nightly ablutions. Although the fresher was shared among several of the cadets, it was late at night now, and he was the only one using it.           

            After folding his uniform and placing it on the sink, he stepped into the sonic, wishing idly for a shower with real water. Neither he nor Rey had any direct experience with one, but they’d felt them on occasion with Ren, and the feeling of real water sluicing down one’s body brought a satisfying heaviness that relaxed the limbs and cleared the mind. He could have used both tonight.

            Still, the sonic was soothing, and it would help him prepare for the sleep he desperately needed. If Rey fell asleep first, that would help as well. Their planetary cycles were not so different, and for years they had adopted similar sleeping habits—it was easier to rise around the same time, even accounting for the differing patterns and habits of the Jedi and the First Order, than for one of them to drag through the day while another slept fitfully. Rey’s almost total control over her own schedule helped with that, although it had become significantly more difficult since they’d lost the ability to communicate with Ren.

            Once the phantom feeling of having been stabbed had almost entirely dissipated, Hux sighed, leaning against the wall. He knew he needed to sleep, but there was something nagging at him beyond his and Rey’s decided failure to communicate fruitfully with Ren. It was like the feeling of a pebble in his shoe or a hair in his mouth, a nagging sensation he couldn’t quite shake.

            _Something is wrong_. Rey had shaken off the first tendrils of sleep and was sitting up. She could feel it as well. Red closed his eyes and looked into the distances towards where Ren should have been.

            The ice wall was still there, but it had thinned. Instead of a thick, rimed-over piece of cloudy frost, it was thin and transparent. Not so transparent that it didn’t distort the images beyond, but transparent enough that if Rey and Red walked up to it, they could squint and see through it.

            Ren lay in his bed, tossing and turning, the same bed he had always slept in, ever since his parents had sent him away. His face was pallid and gleaming with sweat, and he seemed too large for the bed, limbs flung out at odd angles. Not a child anymore, Red thought, with some surprise, although of course none of them were.

            There was a figure bending over Ren, grey and misty. Red could see the wall behind its bulbous, misshapen forehead. Tendrils where its hands should be pierced Ren’s temple and heart. “Oh, stars,” Rey said beside him. “Oh, _stars_ , Ren, no.”

            “How did we let this happen?” Red hated to admit weakness, but Rey wouldn’t hold it against him. She didn’t. She reached out, and he could feel where her hand would have taken his if it hadn’t been for the huge, vast space between them. Was it really letting Ren see Red’s true self? Or was it the fact that he’d tried to hide it in the first place?

            “Sometimes bad things just happen.” Rey, who had been abandoned by her parents with no rhyme or reason. Reluctantly, Red nodded.

            “We have to help him,” he said, and then he watched as a new figure entered the scene.

            A Jedi. Red sneered a little, then looked to the side, embarrassed. Rey punched him in the shoulder with an eye-roll, although it still felt of nothing much. He turned his attention back to the scene with Ren.

            It was Luke, Ren’s master. Luke Skywalker, the hero of the galaxy, looking a little older than the last time they saw him, his blond hair and beard turned muddy with age and streaked with grey. As they watched, he took another step forward, looking down at Ren, wordless. What was he doing there? Surely such behavior was abnormal, Red thought suddenly. Why would Ren’s master invade his sleeping quarters in the middle of the night and not wake him up immediately?

            Well, Red could think of a lot of reasons, and none of them were particularly pleasant. Rey didn’t believe any of them. This was Luke Skywalker—he must just be worried about his padawan.

_Sometimes you’re horrendously naïve._

_At least I’m capable of the emotion of trust._

_I trust you._

_Then trust me to know—_

Their argument fell apart as the unmistakable _whoom_ of a light saber igniting echoed loudly even through the strange ice wall in front of them. Luke Skywalker, hero of the Rebellion, held an active light saber in hand as he looked with hooded eyes down at his apprentice.

            Red felt the ice beneath his fists as he attacked the brittle barrier, and he heard someone screaming. Cold pulsed through his fists, sweeping through his body, but the ice shattered. Ren’s eyes snapped open.

~

He falls out of the dream of the dark figure to hear Red screaming at him to wake up, incoherent but at least the thin connection is _there_ , re-established. Ren reaches for him, feels their hands clasping together, hears the wordless rush of relief and then the scream of, _Watch out!_

            He’s reaching for his light saber before he knows why, eyes opening only as an afterthought. In the sudden bright shadows, he makes out a hooded figure standing over him, another light saber raised in an offensive position. _Hurt him before he hurts you!_ Red yells, and following on the tail end of Red’s screams come Rey’s shivering pleas. _Wait_ , she’s saying, but Ren’s too frightened. He slashes wildly, and there’s an angry buzz-hum. The light of the clashing sabers illuminates Luke’s face, and Ren feels the bottom drop out of his stomach.

            No one. No one to trust. The dark is swirling at the base of his brain, stronger than anything, stronger than Rey, stronger than Red, and very much stronger than Ren. Someone is screaming. Ren feels energy surging like a tide all around him; he takes it and pulls and twists. The figure in front of him is dragged away backwards, and somehow he’s on his feet, with flames springing up all around him.

            There’s a wordless howling around him that might be the wind, but he knows it’s not. It’s the dark whispers in his head, grown to shrieks. The murmurs of _monster_ behind his back are now in front of his face. The only path to safety is to destroy. Cut the connections. _Attachments are weakness_.

            He’s striding forward through the darkness, with the energy of the Force pulsing all around him. He draws it into himself, tearing it away from its proper channel and releasing it in flames that grow ever higher. It’s soothing, in a way; it’s neither cold nor heat. It’s a nothing waiting for him as the fire ravages his mind and the dark takes hold, stronger and stronger. Perhaps this is the secret of nonfeeling that still hides from him in increasingly unpleasant and freezing cold meditation sessions. All he needed was to fall through the pain and come out the other side.

            He’s almost at the temple, fire dogging his path on either side. He’s raising a hand to bring the flames ever higher when he becomes aware of a noise at the edge of his hearing, little more than a muted sob through the fog and the dark. He doesn’t want to listen. It will be a complication; it might jog him out of this effortless serenity.

            _Ren!_ It’s a little clearer this time. _Ren, you bastard, answer me!_ The anger cuts through in a way that the plea didn’t, and he pauses, putting a hand to his forehead. The shadows behind his eyelids are rising, the whispers of another voice—his _monster_ voice—trying to drown the other. There’s a wordless cry, and Ren feels the sudden shock of cold pain that goes through Red’s head as clear as day.

            _Stop that_ , he snarls. _You don’t touch him._ Fuck his serenity. Fuck his safety. Heedless, he grabs the energy and twists it inwards, turning it towards the monstrous lurking shadow. The shadow rears back with surprise, and Red’s voice, breathless, muted, murmurs, _Thanks, Ren._

He’s not done. Rey’s hand on his shoulder tries to hold him back; she sends a wordless note of caution, but he’s not done. The thing’s still there. The monster’s still there, and it hurt Red, and Ren doesn’t care anymore. He’s so tired of people hurting Red and Rey, himself included. He wants to kill all of them, but most of them are too far away, and he can’t touch them. This darkness in his own mind, this monster, though—he can touch it. He can touch it and rend it and rip it to shreds. And if it destroys Ren in the process, well, who but the two of them will care anyway?

            The next thing he’s aware of is sticky liquid on his chin and the dim orange lights of the shuttlebay around him. He can hear Red and Rey speaking still, but, frighteningly, he can’t understand the words. And his head hurts. Oh, god, does his head hurt.

            _\--need to get up—_

_\--can’t tell if we’re getting through—_

_\--go to you, not safe here—_

_\--not much safer—_

_\--better than nothing—_

There’s a tugging in his chest. “Lea’ me ’lone,” he mutters out loud. Luke is probably coming to kill him. He’s not sure why he thinks that, but he knows he’d be better off dead anyway. It’s in the looks everyone gives him, the brushes of fear he feels when he tries to do what Luke suggests and it’s too _easy_ , it’s in the easy way his parents sent him off here years ago. Because he was Vader’s grandson and blood will out. He’s better off dead and probably dying now.

            _Shut up, you fucking asshole. Get up off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and walk yourself into that fucking shuttle. Right now._

Now Red’s angry at him, too. Somehow, he manages to force wobbly legs under him to stand straight. He has to put a hand on the metal side of the shuttle, but if he leans against it very hard, it turns out he can put one foot in front of the other and move to the shuttle door, which yawns open in front of him.

            He stumbles inside, hits the button to close the door panel behind him and slumps down into the pilot’s chair, where he stares at the bewildering array of buttons in front of him, utterly at a loss. Someone is trying to tell him something, but the pain in his head is much too much to focus. Instead, his attention is drawn by the blinking of the lights.

            His hand twitches. Someone asks what the hell he thinks he’s doing. Someone else replies that there’s no choice and do you want Ren to die? The first person points out, sounding impatient, that is he sure this won’t kill him? It doesn’t matter, Ren thinks vaguely. He’s worthless. More importantly, it is pointed out, sometimes you have to make the hard decisions when there’s nothing else you can do. Final, reluctant agreement, and a set of—coordinates?

            Ren watches curiously as his own hands rise and input the coordinates into the nav computer. They’re trembling a little, and they’re a little clumsy, but they manage all right. The last sight Ren has before a more mundane darkness swallows his mind is the sight of his own hands telling the computer to start hyperspace calculations.

~

            They were gone. Hux leaned blankly down over his hands. Rey and Ren were gone. For the first time he could remember, his mind was empty. He was alone. He fought down the first rising tide of panic. The connection had been murky often before; for the last few years, Ren’s voice had been faint, fading in and out. But it had never disappeared entirely. And Rey had always been there, _always_.

            Pain constricted his heart in his chest. It was his fault. He had done something wrong when he took control of Ren’s hands. Either he’d hurt Ren or he’d damaged the connection between them. Ren might be dead, and there was no way for him to know, stuck on this backwater planet, commanding a military force of grown-up children, clinging to the bones of a dead Empire. What was the point of any of it?

            At first, he’d wanted to prove that he _could_. Prove that he was strong enough, smart enough, to take the pain and come out the other side hardened and refined instead of melted into slag. And then, he’d wanted to fix things, he supposed. The world was simplest when it obeyed rules, and if you controlled those rules, people could not hurt you. Order was important. Rey should not be trapped by herself on a dying planet, slowly wasting away. People should not celebrate the ways of the Jedi, when they’d squandered the bounty of the Republic on a narrow philosophy that kept Ren in a cage and told him that he was a monster.

            And they had no idea of resource efficiency, Hux thought in frustration, but then—did anyone else? Sloane, perhaps, thought about such things; his father certainly did not. How much wasted effort had he expended taking out his frustrations on Hux? Useless, pointless, even laying aside the fact that he had made an enemy when he could have had an ally. Would any of them ever listen?

            Then he was thinking about Rey and Ren again. Both of them were light and warmth and safety, two single pinpricks of joy in a world that was otherwise stripped barren and cold. They would not want him to stay here, Hux thought tiredly. Even half an hour ago, he might have argued with them, but they were not here to argue with. And they might never be again. It was silly to argue with someone who wasn’t here.

            He stood up, shivering a little in the cool evening air wafting into the darkened bathroom. He had not had any choice, he reminded himself. If they had left Ren where he was, his master would have killed him. Hux had not recognized the look on the man’s face, but he knew that once someone lifted a weapon, it was over. He had seen it happen. Not often, but often enough.

            And now Ren was probably dead anyway, and he had lost Rey as well somehow. His mind kept ticking through the same dull thoughts over and over again. He could stay here, bury himself in his work, rise through the ranks and become the man his father wanted him to. That it was something he had worked for as well was not immaterial, but—sunk cost fallacy. Hux shrugged. Ruling the galaxy was a noble endeavor, but, in the end, he knew that the galaxy would always be cold and empty now, for him.

            Having shaken off his momentary doubts, he headed outside and began the short walk down to the shuttle-bay. The corridor was empty, which made things easier. It was a pity that the inside of his head during the last hurried connection with Ren had been such a muddle, or he would have had a place to start searching, but, in the end, that didn’t matter. A search was a search. There could not be an infinite number of deserts in the galaxy. He refused to let there be.


	6. Elemental

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren reaches Rey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things started getting kinda metaphysical oops?

           Rey rubbed her arms as she stared up at the darkened sky. It was horribly silent in her head, and she wished she had a better way of ignoring it. But she had to trust in what she’d felt in those final, desperate moments before the pain overwhelmed them, and she found herself severed from Ren and Red. What she’d seen. Ren’s ship leaping into hyperdrive, and the coordinates—she was sure they were right. She wasn’t so stupid as to not know her own coordinates; she’d slipped on and off of the ships in the junkyard nearby, and several of them had functioning nav computers.

            _Come home_ , she whispered into the emptiness in her head.

            After another quarter of an hour, she went back inside the metal remnants of the AT-AT that she’d made her home. Hands shaking only slightly, she prepared some caf. She didn’t have a huge supply, but there was too much at stake for her to fall asleep now. Every ten minutes, she shut her eyes, cupped her hands around the warm mug, and meditated.

            Luke’s meditation lessons hadn’t helped Ren, but they’d helped her. She’d learned to quest outwards with her senses, to find hidden treasure in the junkyard. She’d learned to hear the whispers of people nearby and to feel the shapes of their thoughts. It meant safety, because it meant she had the time to hide if she had to and the ability to gently turn their thoughts away from harming her if it came down to it. Ren couldn’t be that subtle, and Red never seemed able to sense the Force, except to the extent of constantly being in and out of the other two’s heads.

            Now what she was trying to do was different, though. She wasn’t trying to find anything of value or just to listen. She was trying to find two tiny patterns in the entire field of wavering energy that was the Force. And she had no idea where to look.

            She felt a samir curling up with her litter of cubs in the little sandy hole that served as a den. She felt the chill of the night air awakening the gnaw jaws, and the taste of blood and warmth on the wind that they scented as they came out of their burrows to hunt. Further afield, clusters of humans and other sapient species were dotted, many of them asleep, some not. A human boy, apprenticed as an accountant, dozed over pages and pages of sums. A Hutt with a small-scale smuggling operation did the same, although she used a stim injection, not the caf that Rey and the boy were steadily drinking.

            As Rey spread her awareness farther and farther, she felt as if all the ripples in the pattern left by the movements of the beings were like the slow steady pulse of blood in her veins, the intake and exhale of breath of the entire planet. In the skies above her, she felt a great, blank silence open, and a tiny craft tumbled out of hyperspace. Ren’s fear screamed across her awareness for one blinding instant, and then it was gone again, but Rey was already leaping to her feet and running out the door.

            The stars overhead were clear and cold and immobile, all but one. One star was red and screaming and falling, trailing superheated air in its wake and igniting more on its way down. There was a resounding boom as the ship hit the sand, and Rey stared over the desert sands toward it, and then she was running again.

            Flames seemed to spring up around her as she ran, and it took her a moment to realize that they weren’t in her mind, that she’d found one of the two missing bonds again and it was burning down around her. _Ren_! she screamed, but it was no good; all she felt from him was rage and fear. Not even her name remained in his mind. He was like a wounded bantha, lashing out at anything he could find, trying to keep himself safe, but the more he tried to erect his walls, the more his mind spilled out the cracks.

            Her lungs were aching with cold as she raced up to the cockpit door of the crashed ship. The nose had crumpled with the impact, and the shuttle lay grandly on its side in a deep furrow of sand. But the door controls responded to her touch, and she was able to get the door open and peer inside. The cockpit was lit only dimly by the fluorescence of the instrument panel, and she couldn’t really make out much, even with her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the desert night.

            But then, she didn’t need to see him with her eyes when her mind immediately found the figure curled sideways in the pilot chair, weeping softly. “Ren,” Rey said, bending over him. “I need you to walk with me,” she told him.

            He was huge, half a foot taller than her and with hands that looked as if they could break her in half, crooked fingers with broken nails chewed almost to the quick. She couldn’t possibly carry him, she thought, but he was staring at her with a blank face, covered in blood from the nose down. There was no understanding in his brown eyes, no comprehension, only those flickering flames running through the empty spaces in his head.

            Fine. Ren had always been better at this than she was; it was no effort at all for him to lift massive rocks with his mind and toss them about, but that was all right. She could do this. She had the strength of the planet at her back; the Force rippled around her. She picked him up as gently as she could, staggering at the weight, and carried him back out with her into the night.

            The wind screamed around them, and the way back seemed to stretch infinitely longer than the way forward had. The fire kept battering at her; the icy wall had quite burned up, but this was no better. She could not _reach_ Ren through the flames, could not find the shape of his mind without having to snatch her fingers back with an exclamation of pain.

            It was so frustrating, Rey thought irritably, and also so damn _typical_. Ren couldn’t do anything by halves; it was either ice or fire, never something in between. Like maybe a nice lukewarm _bath_ , she thought, shivering from the physical cold in the desert air and wincing at the heat of Ren’s mind on her back. _Come back to me_ , she begged him, but his mind twisted away from her again, so violently that she staggered and nearly dropped him.

            She made it to the entrance of her little shelter and somehow manhandled Ren through the door without slamming his head into the top of it. Sweating and cold at the same time, she was just letting him down onto the bed when she felt the emptiness in the other part of her mind stir and break apart.

            _Red!_ she called softly; at first, there was no response. She had an odd impression of musty cobwebs clearly away from in front of her, and then she saw him, blinking up at her through exhausted, red-rimmed eyes. He looked wrecked, with a half-day’s growth of coppery stubble on his chin and new lines grooved into his face, but there wasn’t a lot of time to think. _Ren needs you._

_I can’t find him._ Red’s voice was coming from so very far away. _I’ve been searching—I couldn’t find you either._

_I thought you’d remember the coordinates._ She sent them again, the long strong of numbers, careful to present them to him slower this time. He gave a snort and a half-hysterical laugh.

            _I was so close._ The thought wasn’t directed at her, but Red seemed sleepy, almost drunk with a feeling Rey couldn’t quite put her finger on.

            _Hurry,_ she urged. _We need you._

The pale green eyes flickered; the chin beneath the stubble firmed. _I’ll be there in a few hours._ To her frustration, the connection chose that moment to snap again, like a wire pulled too taut.

            She spent the rest of the night brewing caf and sitting beside Ren. Her friend lay in her bed and tossed and turned, delirious. The worst part was that he didn’t seem to _recognize_ her, and she couldn’t help him if he wouldn’t let her in. Every time she tried, that awful fire flared up again, and she was forced to pull back. By the time the morning sun rose, she was cranky and exhausted, every muscle in her body aching from the ongoing tension.

            Was Ren going to die? she wondered blearily, pressing her hands over her ears to mute the low moaning sound coming from her bed. He hadn’t really been conscious, but he’d managed a few coherent phrases every now and then. _Please_ , he’d said brokenly, but no matter how much Rey held his hand between hers, she couldn’t get him to respond to anything she said.

            Taking her hands away from her ears, she registered a hollow knocking sound from the metal hatch that served as an entrance. Kriffing hell, what now? She stumbled over and opened it—and came face to face with Red even as their bond snapped back home.

            For a moment, Red just stared at her, as if he was trying to memorize her face. Then he swallowed, pulled himself together, and glanced past her. “Where is he? In your bed?”

            Rey nodded, feeling strangely almost shy as she reached out and took Red’s hand. Properly, for the first time in their lives. His fingers were long and thin, his hands smaller than Ren’s but still larger than hers.

            Red gave her a surprised almost-smile at the thought before pushing past her into the shelter and making a beeline for the large form spilling over the side of her bed. “Ren,” he said softly. “You absolute idiot. Stop pushing us away for once in your kriffing life and let us help.”

            The flaming heat of Ren’s mind flickered for an instant.

            “I have made innumerable errors over the course of my life,” Red said, voice soft and almost emotionless, although Rey could feel that there was something moving beneath his words. She joined him at Ren’s bedside, and this time it was Red who reached out and took her hand. “But I think the worst one I ever made was attempting to hide who I was from both of you. I won’t do it again. And in return, Ren, you have to stop it as well.”

            It was water, beneath his words. Water, lapping at their ankles, rising, steady and deep around them. Water met the sizzling fire insistently, banking it, forcing it to retreat and sizzle out entirely in places. Balked, the fire retreated, but it still sputtered up in places that the water couldn’t reach. Ren was still fighting them. No—Ren was fighting _Red_. What had Rey done, yet?

            “I’m here, too,” she said. She tried to call on the sturdiness of the planet beneath her, to let its strength hold the other two up, but to her surprise, despite how carefully she’d mapped it just hours before, it didn’t seem to be working. She could feel Jakku, there, solid, but she couldn’t lend its strength to Red and Ren.

            Red paused briefly in whatever he was doing and looked over at her. “It helps if you _know_ who you are,” he said. “Is this _really_ your home, Rey?”

            Her home? Of course not. It was just the place where she pitched her tent. Where she waited, until she could take her two soulmates and fly beyond the stars, into the night sky, with the wind at her back. “Oh,” Rey said, understanding all at once, and a trickle of breeze grew into a gale that howled across the fires, blowing the out even as the water rose and rose.

            The last spark guttered out, leaving utter stillness, and for a frightened instant, Rey wondered what would be left without the flames, until the water quivered and shivered and shifted, retreating to let the shivering ground heave and buckle and resettle beneath it.

            Ren’s eyes flickered open for a moment, and Rey took his left hand, and Red took his right. The burning fever eased as she watched, and when Ren’s face went slack again in the next moment, the feeling in his mind wasn’t pain anymore, but just sleep. Rey had a hand pressed to her mouth, struggling to draw in breath.

            “I can’t believe it,” she said, and Red’s voice echoed the words in her head. Rey turned to him, and he opened his arms. He was taller than she’d expected, half a foot above her, but thin as a rail, so thin the wind might have blown him over. For an awkward instant, their lips met, and Red’s hands tightened on her shoulders, and then they were both pulling away. _Not yet,_ someone said, and Rey didn’t know if it was her or Red, only that it wasn’t Ren. Because Ren was who they needed to wait for.


	7. Reunion

            It was warm, and Ren’s head didn’t hurt. His eyelids felt heavy, and his head seemed to be stuffed with cotton wool. Rough cloth scratched against his back, and there was sunlight on his face. Slowly, he turned his head to the side and looked down, flinching as pain shot through a stiff neck.

            His breath hitched. Rey was lying beside him, curled into his side—and he could _feel_ her, not just in his mind, although she was there as well, a warm, bright spot where there had been a ripped, agonizing hole. But he could feel her breath moistly tickling the inside of his elbow, and, as he watched, she murmured something low beneath her breath and shifted against him. How was she _here?_

            There was a weight on his right arm, so that he couldn’t roll up on his elbow, and Ren turned slowly to look to his other side, and almost sobbed out loud. Red wasn’t asleep, but he was lying quietly, motionless, his eyes tracking Ren’s motions. Light green eyes set in a pale face, their color accentuated by the dark circles beneath them. His usually carefully-coiffed hair was sticking up every which way, and his cheekbones looked extremely sharp above the hollows of his cheeks. “Stars,” Red whispered. “I didn’t think—” He cut himself off and took a trembling breath. Ren could feel the rapidity of his heartbeat in his mind and against his chest.

            Without really thinking about it, he tipped his head to the side towards Red, and somehow their lips were together. Red gave a frantic, wordless exclamation, but didn’t pull away.

            A weight lifted on Ren’s other side, and Rey cleared her throat. “Boys,” she said, sounding vaguely miffed, “couldn’t you at least wait for me?”

            Ren pulled back and gulped in a long breath of air. “How?” he murmured. All he had to do was curl his arms and Rey and Red were both pulled on top of him. Rey was grinning down, but Red was still quiet, his face pale—he looked so much _older_ than the last time Ren had seen him, Ren thought suddenly. “How am I here? How are _you_ here?”

            “I should be asking you that.” Red glanced from him to Rey. “I haven’t seen either of you, inside or outside of my head, in ten years.” His voice shook a little on the final word. “You—Rey doesn’t look any different. I don’t know about you, Ren, by the end, you were—very faint.”

            “Ten _years_?” Ren sounded hoarse to his own ears. But then, he didn’t know how many years it had been since he started shutting them out, either. Since the argument and his subsequent utterly disastrous attempts to control his Jedi training.

            “I was talking to both of you last night,” Rey said, and she felt as stupefied as he did.

            “You also look—the same as the last time I saw you. Both of you do. Do I look the same?” Red asked, arching an eyebrow into the air. “Surely I at least look more mature.”

            “I thought you were just scruffy,” Rey shrugged. “Unusual for you, but…” She ran a hand lightly over his cheek. “Stars. Ten years.”

            He had been afraid that he wouldn’t see either of them again. The bone-deep fear shook Ren, even though Red had been very careful never to vocalize the possibility of failure to himself, even as he carefully sliced the galaxy into wedges, crossing off planet after planet based on the few memories he’d been able to scrape together from Rey, keeping up a steady flow of income from engineering jobs and the occasional smuggling job.

            “I was almost at Jakku,” Red said carefully. “Really, I’m a bit vexed you couldn’t wait for long enough for me to find you. I _would_ have.”

            Ren curled his arm protectively around Red, as if he could protect him from the passage of time that Ren hadn’t seen, hadn’t felt. Rey hadn’t felt it either. How was it only Red had traveled into the future to find them?

            “We used to be the same age,” Rey pointed out. “All three of us. But Ren, when you slipped away, that started to change. And I know you used to say you were a victory child—when were you born?”

            “5 ABY,” Ren replied, and Red flinched as if he’d been struck. Something that he’d carefully avoided thinking about because it was symbolic of the difference between the three of them, and he’d been stupid enough not to think of what it might mean for the real timeline each of them was inhabiting.

            “I was born before the Empire fell,” he admitted, although Ren had already seen it in his mind.

            “The Force connected us, and the Force brought us back together,” Rey said with delight.

            “It could have chosen a less cruel way to do that,” Ren croaked, his voice still hoarse with disuse.

            “We survived, didn’t we?” Red said, but he tipped his head forward and closed his eyes, pressing his mouth against the junction of Ren’s shoulder and neck. It wasn’t a kiss so much as an insistent movement, and Ren tangled one large hand in Red’s hair. Rey rolled over until she was lying on top of him so that she could stroke Red’s back.

            “We were strong enough,” she said. “We _are_ strong enough. And now we’re together. Just like we promised we’d be.”

            Red nodded into Ren’s shoulder, and then it _was_ a kiss or something close to it, Red mouthing over Ren’s throat and his shoulder. Ren bit his lip and took a shuddering breath, the hand about Red’s head tightening in his hair. His other hand sought Rey’s small one, and then she was kissing his mouth.

            All three of them moved slowly. There was no rush now. They had made it past the time for action, into a stillness and safety beyond that Ren didn’t think he’d ever felt. He mapped Rey’s body while Red mapped his, taking their time with the hollows, the marks, the shivering, sudden reactions. Rey squealed when he nibbled at her side, and he felt everything slide away when Red caressed his inner thigh.

            After some time, Ren’s body was tingling and warm all over, and he could feel the echo of it in Rey, both of them breathing hard and slippery with sweat. Most of their clothes had been discarded, but Red was still in his trousers; he’d been the one receiving the least attention.

            “Time to switch around, I think,” Ren said slowly, and Rey nodded. She moved backward, letting Ren pat the space between them. Ren watched Red bite his lip, then carefully remove the last of his clothing and, nodding, position himself between them.

            The first thing Ren noticed as he began to explore Red’s body was that Red had a cascade of freckles down one shoulder, like a bucket of stars had been spilled down it. It turned out to be a sensitive spot as well—he could wring a really impressive number of gasps out of his friend by just lathing his tongue over there again and again. He exchanged occasional kisses with Rey as they both worked to bring Red to the same level of tingling arousal that the two of them had reached.

            “We’ll need—” Red gasped as Rey did something Ren couldn’t quite see. “— _Ren_ —I need you. I need— _please_. _Stars_. Rey, you too.”

            “You mean you want—” Rey looked up, almost startled, and then grinned wickedly. “Oooh, that sounds exciting.”

            “Yes, but we’ll need the _kriffing_ lubricant, or at least _Ren_ will—” Ren caught the image of what they were talking about, finally, and felt himself going hot across the back of the neck. He pulled the location of the necessary item out of Red’s mind. It was oddly easy, and even easier to reach out into the desert and snatch it from Red’s shuttle. Rey was helping a little, he could tell, but his powers had never obeyed him like this. “I need—” Red gasped as Ren ran an inquiring finger along his inner thigh again. “— _stars_. Please, Ren, _please_. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

            “That’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?” Ren rumbled in his ear, and Red swore breathlessly, helplessly, then gave a shout as Rey closed the distance between the two of them. Ren had to pause at the spike of pleasure that surged through all three of them, and he whined, biting down against Red’s shoulder, almost dizzy with lust.

            Thankfully, it didn’t take long to retrieve the lubricant; Ren thought he might have gone slightly insane otherwise. Red and Rey were moaning already, so far gone that Ren said in a wounded tone of voice, “What about me?”

            “Join in, then, you idiot,” snarled Red, and he moved himself and Rey to give Ren easier access.

            It didn’t take long to prepare him, although the noises Rey was making were something of a distraction, and Ren wished he could—both of them at once—but it was Red’s turn for that, he deserved it— _stars, ten years—_ and then Red was ready, and Ren moved forward, and the last loose connection clicked home.

            All three of them moved together, air whistling over the water while the earth moved beneath it. The very last boundary between them had been erased, and they were three-in-one, sobbing out obscenities, begging, responding. They knew what each of them needed before it was verbalized, sometimes before the originator knew, and the galaxy grew small as they explored each other together.

            It was Red who reached the edge first, cursing and weeping, but he dragged the other two after him easily, and everything became one long wash of heated pleasure. When Ren finally limped back into something almost like his own head, he was curled up with his knees behind Red’s knees. Rey lay sprawled over both of them with a huge smile on her face.

            None of them moved for several minutes, too warm and contented and happy. Then Red stretched and spoke, his voice halfway between wistful and awed.  “I gave up the galaxy for the two of you.”

            He would have made an excellent emperor, Ren thought vaguely, and received a light scolding mental slap from Rey. “Do you regret it?” he asked.

            A long pause. When Red finally spoke, his voice was wondering, “No.”

            Ren found himself grinning wickedly. “I don’t know about you giving it up,” he remarked lightly. “You could hardly have a better army than the two of us at your side.”

            “We are not taking over the galaxy! That’s _wrong_ ,” Rey complained, but she didn’t sound angry.

            “So naïve, Rey,” Red drawled, leaning up to press a kiss into her cheek. “But if you prefer, we can choose a different path.”

            “Well, we don’t have to make any choices right now, except which kinds of rations you’d like for breakfast,” Rey replied pragmatically.

            Ren didn’t think he’d ever been so happy. Certainly not since his parents sent him away, since the dark thing had started trying to claw at the edges of his brain.

            “Don’t think about it now,” Red told him sharply. “We don’t know what it was, we don’t know if it’s dead, and we’ll have to deal with it at some point, but for now—”

            Ren nodded slowly. “It’s enough to know I’m not a monster,” he replied. “Yeah.” Rey was rolling upright, probably to go and fetch the rations, but he caught her arm and pulled her back down so that he could kiss first her mouth and then Red’s. “Thank you,” he said softly. “Thank you both. For not giving up on me.”

            “We love you.” Rey smiled and kissed his nose. “Of course we wouldn’t give up on you.”

            “You’re _ours_ ,” Red added fiercely. “And you always will be.” Ren sought their hands and held them roughly. There were tears in his eyes, but the weight of the earth at his back, because he’d finally, finally made it home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading :)

**Author's Note:**

> This is not going to be a super-long fic, although it works best in chaptered format, but it may end up being part of a series if I feel like continuing it.


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